[tied] Re: Automatic clustering of languages

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 48271
Date: 2007-04-05

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

> Aren't Malay and Indonesian the same language?

They each have an army and a navy, and they used to have significantly
different orthographic rules.

I believe there's a difference between the standards. Ethnologue
states that Indonesian and 'standard Malay' are 'over 80% cognate'.
In the word lists we've been discussed, they differ in only one word.
Depending how you gathered the data, two of the sixteen meanings
might get different English words - 'belly' v. 'tummy' v. 'stomach'
(and is 'gut' possible?) and 'dad' v. 'daddy' v. 'father'.

Richard.